The story
Most French provincial museums were stocked from church seizures during the Revolution. Rennes had a shortcut. When the estate of Christophe-Paul de Robien, a president of the Breton parlement who died in 1756, was confiscated in 1792, the town inherited one of the largest private cabinets in Europe in a single stroke, with paintings, Egyptian and Greek antiquities, and a drawings collection where sheets by Leonardo, Botticelli and Rembrandt sit mixed together.
That windfall is still the core of what you see. The work people come for is Georges de La Tour's 'The Newborn', painted around 1645, a mother and a woman shielding a candle whose flame you never actually see, so the whole scene glows from a light hidden behind a hand. Around it hang Veronese, Rubens and a deep run of Italian and Northern painting.
The building itself came later, a 19th-century palace on the Quai Emile Zola that also long housed the university library, which is why generations of Rennes students studied a floor below one of La Tour's rarest canvases.
